Examples described herein relate to a system and method for performing image similarity operations using semantic classification. Search systems currently exist for identifying images and image content in response to user queries. In particular, image search systems exist for responding to text-based queries, as well as to image-based queries. Image-based queries can process image data, such as a Joint Photographic Expert Group (“JPEG”) file, as input. The search result for such image-based queries can include images or image content that are deemed similar in visual appearance to the query image.
Search systems that perform image similarity have applications for image search and retrieval. Under many conventional approaches, image similarity operations use histograms of color and/or texture, and then combine the histograms with weights that are learned through training.